From time to time beginning illustrators contact me to ask whether Photoshop or Corel Painter is the better choice for digital illustration work.

I think in fact there’s no wrong choice to make. After an artist gets used to the digital “landscape” of a program and using a tablet (I recommend Wacom tablets, by the way) that the program is not as important as one might think. Basically it is learning how to use the various brushes and effects to obtain the look you want. And that can be done with any of the modern painting programs.

Painter is aimed at more painterly effects and makes the task a bit easier, perhaps. But beautiful work, and very painterly at that, is done by Photoshop artists.

For those considering programs for illustration work, I also suggest considering Corel PhotoPaint, the poor forgotten child of the corporation’s collection of paint programs. I use PhotoPaint almost exclusively for my illustration work and find it considerably faster than either Paint or Photoshop, especially when I take advantage of PhotoPaint’s capability to add keyboard shortcuts.

If you plan on working for a corporation (as opposed to freelancing) then Photoshop is sort of the industry standard and probably worth adopting from the git-go. However it does have a higher “ticket price” than the other two, so you might want to take that into consideration as well.
(One way to save money is student discounts – if you’re a student — or purchasing an older version of the program which generally has nearly all the same capabilities for a much lower price.)

If you go with Paint or PhotoPaint, bear in mind that Corel has a tendency to release programs before thoroughly debugging them. When you buy one of these, be sure to go to the Corel site and download the “updates” and bug fixes and install them before trying to use the program for any length of time. And I would recommend against adopting a just-out-of-the-chute version of any Corel program. Let someone else play the part of beta tester.

Since there are time-limited demos of all three of these programs, perhaps the best route for deciding which is best for you is to download them and try them for yourself. Creating illustrations is a very individualistic thing. Chances are you’ll feel more at home with one or the other of these programs.

Since they all are capable of delivery the same styles of work, discovering which can make the tasks you do regularly can make your work considerably faster and easier. Over time, the speed of your work can be important in making a living.

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Duncan Long is a freelance book cover illustrator for HarperCollins, PS Publishing, Pocket Books, Solomon Press, Fort Ross, and many other publishers and self-publishing authors. See his cover illustrations at: http://DuncanLong.com/art.html
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